How is procedural terrain generation used in video games?

How is procedural terrain generation used in video games?

Procedural terrain generation is a field that handles procedural, not by hand, generated realistic looking terrain for use in simulations, video games, movie special effects or art. It allows for creation of vast and far more detailed terrain than humans can create by hand. In this paper a new method for procedural terrain generation is presented.

How is the height of the terrain generated?

This is done by using an algorithm to generate a pseudo-random noise texture, named Perlin noise. A 2D view of this noise looks as follows: By mapping the pure white to an altitude of -100 meters and pure black to +3000 meters, we generate the height of the terrain. The resulting information is called a height-map.

How is the nature of the terrain chosen?

The nature of the terrain (grass, ground, rock, water) is then chosen randomly based on the height, surface gradient and another set of pseudo-random textures based on Perlin noise. For instance, we decided that grass grows at lower heights when the terrain’s slope is flat enough.

How to generate procedural terrain in Unity 3D engine?

Let us look at how we can generate procedural terrain in the unity 3d engine. So what is procedural generation useful for. Procedural generation is great technique to keep your games fresh and interesting, by introducing randomly or algorithmic-ally generated content.

How to create procedural terrain in Visual Studio?

Our first order of business is to get a 1×1 quad set up with 4 vertices. Then we will move on to generating a grid of vertices and then finally filling in triangles. So head over to your terrain game object and in the inspector click on add component and type in ProceduralTerrain and create and add script. So now open it up in Visual studio.

How are octaves created in procedural terrain generation?

The octaves themselves are created by filling in evenly spaced pseudo random numbers corre- sponding to the octaves’s frequency, and then cal- culate the remaining values by interpolation – see Figure 2 for a visual comparison of interpolation methods.

Which is better cubic or cubic interpolation for terrain generation?

While cubic interpolation gives the best results, the slightly visible vertical and horizontal artifacts caused by linear interpolation are an ac- ceptable trade-off for a computation time reduced to roughly one fifth. Midpoint displacement

How is line of sight computed in procedural terrain?

In the case of procedural terrain, line of sight information can’t be easily computed since the level geometry can change with each regeneration.

Can you use offline occlusion in procedural terrain generation?

While you could compute this type of occlusion information in an offline process after generating your world data, it is more difficult still to determine if unloading a subset of temporarily invisible chunks will be a net benefit to performance without the ability to manually test every configuration.